This fellowship will pioneer interdisciplinary understanding of the impact of digital change on the cultural memory practices and the 'official' record of the British Army's unit operational reports ('war diaries') through comparative research over two archival sites: the Ministry of Defence, Whitehall and The National Archives (TNA). Military units document and record their activities in theatre (active combat) by keeping war diaries. War diaries are official records that (i) capture information to be used at a later time by the military to improve training and tactics, and (ii) establish a comprehensive record of a unit's activities to enable future historical research. The CMU's key work includes: improving operational record keeping (i.e. collecting, organising, and archiving active war diaries); developing and maintaining briefing documents to support current operations; working with treasury solicitors and others in compensation claims, and providing documents for public inquiries. TNA is the UK government's official archive. It contains over 1,000 years of history. Staff at the National Archives give detailed guidance to government departments and the public sector on information management and advise others about the care of historical archives. This work pioneers a a cultural memory studies' approach which sees memory as cultural and social practices which orient persons to possible versions of the past in such a way as to make them relevant to ongoing personal, institutional and political concerns. This approach will be applied to the first ever ethnography of the British Army's Corporate Memory Unit (CMU) in the MOD, Whitehall, London after securing unprecedented access. This crucially enables the project to uniquely interrogate the connections and disconnections across and between the often publicly accessible features of the new war ecology (public archives, TNA) and the relatively hidden military organizational knowledge production and management (MOD). This fellowship will examine how the advent of highly mobile digital images and recordings from the frontline presents an unprecedented challenge to the organizational memory of the Army constructed in the context of over a century of maintaining unit war diaries, and what this transformation could mean for changes in the forms of knowledge about war, for the military, archivists, historians and publics. The impetus for this fellowship is the 21st century Western-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being embedded in the 'connective turn' (Hoskins 2010, 2011). This is the massively increased scale, volume and complexity of digital/digitized information that shape a new knowledge base - an 'information infrastructure ' (Bowker and Star 2000) through which wars are planned, fought, historicised, and (de)legitimised. In this period, Government electronic record keeping systems have eclipsed previous paper-based systems, which 'has been accompanied both by a marked deterioration in record keeping practices and the use of record keeping to enable an audit culture' (Moss 2012: 860). Specifically, the recent Iraq and Afghanistan wars mark the evolution of the MOD organizational memory system from paper to digital. Although the organization was using computers in 2001, it was still operating a paper system, i.e. printing out work and placing in paper files. This compares with the 300 million digital files from operations in Iraq it has to manage today.

This proposal is tightly focussed on addressing major unmet clinical needs in the repair and rehabilitation of non-union fractures, in particular for long-bone and cranio-facial trauma. A non-union is a broken bone that fails to heal. These result from both civilian and military injuries including the consequences of cancer and lead to pain, suffering and loss of dignity. Our aim is to create a co-ordinated self-sustaining network linking the Trauma HTC and other major UK clinical research centres, both civilian and military, in order to pull solutions from the science and technology research community and assist their translation to the clinic. The network will link with centres of expertise and research excellence in healthcare technologies supported by EPSRC and others, and to industry and other key stakeholders including patients. This network will ensure, by a programme of activities with both proven and novel components, that these disparate communities are empowered to explore together those areas where new scientific and technological opportunities have the promise to resolve important clinical problems.

Explosions are a pressing and pervading threat in the modern world. Terrorist events such as the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, large-scale industrial accidents such as the 2020 Beirut explosion, and the current conflict in Ukraine, have highlighted a key gap in our knowledge: we do not we do not yet understand how blast waves propagate and interact with multiple obstacles in complex environments. Accordingly, we cannot yet predict the loading from such events, and our ability to determine the consequences relating to risk, structural damage, and casualty numbers, is severely limited. Current numerical tools for predicting blast loads in complex environments are either overly simplistic, or physics-based numerical tools which have been hitherto developed in the absence of experimental validation data. Clearly, progress in this area is limited and will remain so until we have the ability to experimentally measure the output from explosions occurring in settings of varying complexity at varying scales. This proposal will see the development of an ambitious and unique experimental facility, MicroBlast, for ultra-small-scale studies of blast propagation in complex environments, making use of rapid prototyping and 3D printing to generate true replica test specimens. MicroBlast will be a new state-of-the-art apparatus for data-rich, high spatial/temporal resolution, multi-parameter, full-field measurements of blast loading using a combination of pressure sensors, stereo high speed video cameras, and medium-wave infra-red cameras. This facility will be a step-change in our ability to perform rapid, precision experiments in explosive load quantification; the blast equivalent of a wind tunnel or shaking table test. We aim to study the fundamental mechanisms governing blast load development in complex environments, and set the agenda for future research in this area. Are explosions in crowded environments repeatable and deterministic, or are they highly sensitive to small changes in input parameters? What are the consequences for numerical modelling tools and experimental design? We aim to develop the next generation of predictive approaches for blast in urban environments, and to collectively raise the scientific benchmark of load prediction and structural damage assessment.

In current automated face recognition systems, the user is required to cooperate with the system: they must stand in a certain place, face the camera and maintain a neutral expression. Under these controlled imaging conditions, face recognition algorithms perform well. One of the greatest remaining research challenges is to recognize faces in uncontrolled conditions. Now the subject may be entirely unaware of the system, and consequently the position, pose, illumination and expression of their face exhibit considerable variation. In such uncontrolled conditions, all current commercial and academic face recognition systems fail.In this project, we will develop an entirely new probabilistic approach to face recognition that is particularly suited to such uncontrolled conditions. We will develop a series of algorithms to tackle these problems and validate them in laboratory and real-world situations. Potential applications include -ACCESS CONTROL. Current face recognition systems require the implicit cooperation of the user. This research will remove this requirement and increase the effciency, robustness and user-friendliness of access control applications.-SECURITY FOOTAGE. The UK has 4 million CCTV cameras, but current face recognition methods flounder because of the variable capture conditions. This research will permit automated analysis of faces in CCTV footage.-FACE SEARCH. Recognition methods fail on archived images because the faces have variable poses, illuminations and expressions. The proposed techniques are invariant to these factors and allow face search: users provide a probe face image and our algorithms can search the internet, or a set of photos for images of the same person.-FACE SYNOPSES. Current techniques cannot accurately identify how many different people were present in a set of images and where each appeared. Applications include automatically summarizing surveillance footage so it is possible to see at a glance how many individuals entered and left an area and when.-HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION. There are innumerable other situations where it would be useful for a computer or robot to recognize human identity. An important step in making computers more social and easy to interact with is to provide them with a robust and transparent way of recognizing their users.

The World Health Organisation says that there are about 100 million people globally who need prosthetic or orthotic (P&O) services and as populations age, more than two billion people are expected to require health-related assistive devices by 2030. In the UK the Disabled Living Foundation estimates that 6.5 million people live with mobility disablement, with many reliant on P&O services, including an estimated two million orthotic users. In parts of the developing world the aftermath of conflict, such as land mines, and greater rates of traumatic injuries from accidents, means there is a growing need for prosthetics and orthotics for younger people living in poor social and economic circumstances. Often they need P&O devices to stay at work and sustain their families. Poor devices, services and access to these contravene their basic human rights. In the context of this need, we want to establish the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in P&O. This will address the national, and global, shortage of suitably skilled engineers and scientists to become future innovators in P&O technologies. Current academia, industry and care centres have limited researchers, and research activity has lagged behind rapid technology advancements. The Centre will support a minimum of 58 doctoral students whose studies will enable them to become leaders of the future. The Centre will bring together the only two P&O undergraduate education facilities in the UK (Salford and Strathclyde) with P&O research centres of excellence at Imperial College and the University of Southampton. Our vision is for the Centre to become the national and global leader in P&O research training, and the translation of research into innovation that impacts on the lives of people each day, in developed and developing countries. The Centre will work to support training for students from low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Our students will be immersed in industry and real-world experiences which will equip them to lead the P&O sector across technology, social or economic contexts. Our aims are to: 1. Develop a new model of P&O research training and translation of research into innovation. In addition to the doctoral training, this will result in Master's programmes operating across Institutions. 2. Produce ambitious PhD research projects that will be grounded in real-world challenges, but at the cutting-edge of new biomedical science and technologies. 3. Produce a significant impact on the UK P&O industry sector by leading innovation. 4. Have an international impact by attracting an increasing number of CDT students from overseas. 5. Establish a P&O student society which will have matured into a lasting doctoral community with international reach. 6. To have a significant impact on the training of doctoral candidates from LMIC. 7. Attract additional external funding for P&O research. Creating a new generation of P&O research leaders will, over time, have a significant economic, societal and health impact. For users, it will mean access to improved generations of assistive devices which will match the users' needs resulting in a better quality of life. Clinical services will benefit from improved service data, superior products and improved user outcomes. For industry, it will open up new market opportunities, nationally and globally. For the students themselves, they will have access to careers that have a real purpose, enabling them and their future teams to make a difference in the lives of people with disabilities.